This paper reports on a sociolinguistic research project which aims to identify changes occurring in Paris French and to compare them with those – more intensively studied – which affect London English. In London it has been found that innovations start among young bilinguals and gradually spread to monolinguals  (Cheshire et al 2008; 2011; Fox, 2012). Data being collected from young people who speak ethnically influenced varieties in Paris will allow us to determine whether the trends are similar, or whether there are differences, due notably to the different internal (linguistic) and external (social) factors that affect the features under study.

Recent work on contemporary trends in French youth language (Gadet 2003, Fleischman and Yaguello 2004, Secova 2013) as well as our own incipient findings show that some conversational elements are particularly prone to innovation. This applies for example to discourse markers (e.g. genre), quotatives (e.g. faire genre, être là) and general extenders (e.g. et tout, machin). Examples of spontaneous spoken French from the corpus collected in Paris will be compared with similar features from London. The fact that similar changes appear to occur in both settings, despite the social and linguistic differences, suggests that some elements may be particularly prone to innovatory change.

Contact: Marina Kolokonte

Location: CNW Seminar Room 11

The notion that languages can be rhythmically classified as stress- or syllable-timed has been a staple of linguistics for over half a century and has been used as the cornerstone of psycholinguistic research on language acquisition and speech processing. The idea of rhythm classes privileges timing (the relative duration of speech intervals, such as syllables, stress feet or vocalic and consonantal intervals) as the main exponent of speech rhythm even though this view is at odds with basic psychological principles of rhythm perception. In this talk, I will review the literature on speech rhythm and present research on speech production and perception that casts doubt on the validity of both traditional rhythm measures based on interval durations and on experimental paradigms often used to probe rhythm perception. Overall, the results of these studies show that timing may not as important for creating speech rhythm as is often thought, while stimuli stripped of prosodic dimensions other than timing are not ecologically valid. Further, the experiments show that taking into account additional dimensions of prosody (such as F0 and amplitude) is crucial for a better and cross-linguistically valid understanding of speech rhythm. Taken all together the results suggest that in order to understand speech rhythm it is necessary to decouple the quantification of timing from the study of rhythmic structure, take each language’s prosodic features into account, and adopt a conception of rhythm as the product of prominence and patterning. This view of rhythm is supported by results from cycling and empirical mode decomposition and has the advantage of being psychologically plausible and not relying on a questionable and ultimately unsuccessful division of languages into rhythmic classes.

Contact: Marina Kolokonte

Location: CNW Seminar Room 11